


To Serve the Gods Beyond

by Telaryn



Category: Leverage
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-25
Updated: 2012-08-25
Packaged: 2017-11-15 01:19:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/521568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Telaryn/pseuds/Telaryn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The team are elemental beings, destined to save the world from itself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Serve the Gods Beyond

  
Parker was nine when the skies called her home. She was born this lifetime to a family that didn’t want her – a man and a woman too young and too weighed down by their own human pain to recognize the precious gift they’d been given in the baby with the sky-blue eyes and the laughter in her heart. Eventually they gave her up to the System, but the System didn’t understand her any better than her birth parents had. They found her a new family and walked away, believing the problem was solved, and their role in Parker’s life complete.

They didn’t have it in them either to recognize the gift she was to the world. Her new family saw only the monetary value the System assigned her and demanded that she set her laughter aside. Which she did, being a dutiful child and wanting to please the families she was given.

Eventually, once the skies called her back, she was able to remember that her human families were lies, a means to an end – a way for the Gods beyond the skies to insert her fully into the world they’d made. She accepted their decision as necessary, but it marked her. She forgot how to laugh, she forgot how to care – she forgot everything except the lure of what the skies promised her.

They sent her a teacher once her memories returned, a man who shared her cynicism about the world and the nature of families. He gave her body what it needed – food, shelter, security – and asked only that she find him treasure.

In return he taught her how to fly.

Eliot didn’t know a time in this life when the fire hadn’t been with him. It warmed him, drove him – ruled his passion and his rage. It lit the world around him with a deep, dramatic glow – throwing some things into sharp-edged relief, and making others sparkle. He was given this lifetime to a family that loved and wanted him, and parents that recognized the fire that burned in his soul.

He was sixteen when his father finally helped him see that fire as a thing that needed to be controlled. Unchecked it could blaze out across the world, causing more death and destruction than Eliot’s human brain could process and still remain sane. Properly controlled and directed, it would give him the power to change everything.

What his father forgot and the Gods beyond the fire didn’t care to remember was that the controlled and directed flame forges weapons as well as tools. Seeking the control and direction that he so desperately needed, Eliot fell under the influence of the System. The System saw in him great value – the means to make itself stronger, make its power more absolute. They fashioned him into the perfect weapon and unleashed him on the world.

It was ten years and more before he would be strong enough to break free of the System’s hold, and in that time Eliot lost the higher values his human family had given him. He forgot generosity and caring, laughed only rarely, and devoted his life to the “want-take-have”. The fire had shaped him, but the Gods beyond the fire knew it would take a stronger hand to direct him on his ultimate path.

The System took Alec Hardison early, for they recognized in his mind a threat to the natural order of things. They separated him from hearth and home and took him out of reach of the Gods beyond the earth before anyone had a chance to know what was happening or why. The System’s intent was to break his spirit, so that his mind could be harnessed in service to their goals.

No one could predict how such raw, untethered power would react, but the Gods beyond the earth are patient Gods, with power of their own outside the System’s understanding. The System found him a home, because all children in the System needed a home – otherwise they would have let him continue to drift. The woman they found to shelter him wasn’t anyone’s idea of a parent, but the influence of hearth and home was strong in her soul and she managed to anchor the child Alec back to his humanity. The body was fed and sheltered and the boy given enough discipline to allow his mind to grow into the fullness of its power.

And when he was old enough, the boy turned on the System. He declared their ways unjust, named himself a man and their superior, and went out to make his way in the world alone. He never forgot to bless the name of the woman who’d raised him, however, so the Gods beyond earth kept their hold on his heart.

Water was the element no one could hold and no one could master. Every time the System tried to exert its influence on the child Sophie Devereaux, her nature would shift her safely out of its grasp. As she grew and flourished, Sophie gloried in the power she wielded – recognizing no authority and accepting no control.

She was a woman grown when the water first called her home, but the control she’d rejected her entire life meant that she didn’t understand what was being asked of her. Rules were for lesser beings, and the Gods beyond the waters had sent her no teacher to show her that offering her heart to others carried with it a power unlike any other the woman Sophie had ever known.

The System eventually turned its back on her, frustrated beyond reason in its attempts to understand and control her. If she wanted no part of it, it would have no part of her.

As the chaos between them died down and each went their own way, the water called Sophie to its bosom again. It was a quieter call than before, and the woman Sophie was more settled in her power and her ways so she was more receptive to the possibilities promised by the Gods beyond the water now.

And this time they had a teacher for her; a wise man, rooted in the ways of spirit, who could show her the path to glory.

Unlike his fellows, the Child of Spirit was born within the bosom of the System. He needed to know its wants, its needs and its ways beyond simple understanding. He needed to have the measure of the System at a bone-deep level before he would be able to understand how to harness the power of the others and bring it down.

Being born in the System meant that he needed to be cut free of it before he would be able to walk with the power of the Gods beyond. The first cuts were tentative in nature as the universe tested how deeply entrenched he was in the place of his birth. They caused him pain, but they weren’t savage enough by half to set him free and bring him to his birthright. The one that finally did the job was so deep and so bloody that it nearly separated spirit from reason and risked unleashing a horror that would turn on everyone in its path without discrimination or understanding.

A man grown when he was finally reborn to his destiny, Nathan Ford was the only one of them cursed to know the “big picture”…the “greater good”. He used his knowledge and his power to call Parker from the skies and Eliot from the wastelands. He bound Alec Hardison more completely to his humanity and gave him a hearth and home of his own, and he taught Sophie Devereaux the power she could know by risking her heart and herself for love.

Nate Ford called them together and using his knowledge and his power he remade them into something greater than themselves. He taught them a different way and honed them to the peak of their gifts.

And when they were ready, he unleashed them on a System that had no means to stand against them.


End file.
